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From: Niklas Holsti <niklas.holsti@tidorum.invalid>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Subject: Re: Legit Warnings or not
Date: Sat, 23 Jul 2011 12:20:53 +0300
Organization: Tidorum Ltd
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Date: 2011-07-23T12:20:53+03:00
List-Id: <comp.lang.ada>

Randy Brukardt wrote:

> My point being that hidden pointers are extremely common in the 
> implementation of modern programming languages, and certainly are common in 
> Ada implementations. The only language I know of that insists on making such 
> things explicit is C, and I think even it has some cases where the pointers 
> are implicit (struct parameters).

Continuing that parenthesis: struct parameters in C are passed by value 
unless you explicitly declare the parameters as pointers. I think the 
only implicit introduction of "pointer" in C is when a function 
parameter is declared as an array or a function, in which case the 
formal parameter type is actually a pointer to the declared type. Other 
rules let you omit the "address of" operator (&) on the actual parameters.

<anecdote>
This reminds me that an early version of GNAT (perhaps 3.03?) was 
designed to be "compatible" with C in this respect and to pass all 
record-type parameters by value. We upgraded to this version of GNAT in 
the middle of an application development and in consequence had to tell 
the users to run the relatively small application with a 10 MB stack 
allocation -- rather a lot in those days. As I recall, the next version 
of GNAT went back to call-by-reference for record types.
</anecdote>

-- 
Niklas Holsti
Tidorum Ltd
niklas holsti tidorum fi
       .      @       .